Time for a New Desktop

My Windows desktop has two DVI LCD displays, and a Microsoft (hiss!)
Natural Keyboard. I'll still be using Windows reasonably often but I
don't want to be rearranging keyboards, mice and monitors on my desk
constantly. An extra monitor on my desk, and a USB-DVI KVM switch, and
all that's nicely arranged. Sure, when I switch to FreeBSD sometimes
the mouse is all messed up: moves the wrong direction, won't send
clicks, buttons confused. But this doesn't happen often, and if I just
switch back to Windows a couple of times, it sorts itself out.

After I'd recompiled and installed my editor, and installed some fonts
from source, the next thing to get right were having the two screens
display a different image: they were defaulting to clone mode (same
image on both screens.) That was pretty easy to fix up in the end.

Oh, but before I did that there was also the kernel that needed to be
recompiled, because I needed to be able to run Java. Sure, I've only
got JDK1.5, but that's pretty close to up-to-date, and I really don't
know why you'd need anything more recent.

Somewhere in here I had to get some assistance from the
sysadmin. While installing those fonts up above, one of the packages
had complained that an existing package hadn't been installed
correctly, it very helpfully told me how to de-install and re-install
it. Nice. That package had a 'delete' dependency on KDM, the login
window for KDE, and then on re-install KDM didn't come back, so I had
to get the sysadmin to reinstall KDE. It hardly took him anytime at
all. People who design packages really should get their dependencies
correct.

So, I've got my desktop working again, my editor running, and some
nice TrueType fonts available. Emacs can't see any of those TrueType
fonts, but I'm sure with a few more recompiles with different
configure options it will all come right. The one remaining problem
was getting FreeBSD to use both screens in something other than clone.

Configuring Xinerama wasn't the right way to go: the web recommended
that and a colleague already had that working. But it wasn't right for
me. I had to download the source code for my video card driver from
nVidia (after I found someone with the same machine as me, running
Windows, and asked them what video card they had.) I hacked the source
to the driver, as it complained that FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT wasn't
supported, although I was running FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE. A few small
changes to the source and it compiled straight away. Then I ran the
nVidia config tool, and restarted. That very nicely controlled both
monitors by turning one off and the other on. But right there on the
nVidia site were instructions on how to enable TwinView. Perfect!
After I'd rewritten /etc/X11/Xorg.conf based on their instructions
and what I knew about my video card and monitors, I restarted again.

And... perfect! Two independent monitors that I can arrange windows on
to my heart's content!

So, I really don't know what you're waiting for, you really should
dump those Macs and Windows computers and switch straight to
FreeBSD! You have no idea how good the kernel is. Sure, it isn't as
good as Solaris, but it's miles better than Linux.